Brian's Blog misc

Just wanted to say hi to Dave and mention his nerd t-shirt store at http://www.nerdkungfu.com .

He's a regular at our weekly Bad Movie Night, and I think a lot of the movies we've screened have shown up as t-shirts on his site a few weeks later. If …

Must.. write.. more. I'm trying to get over the temptation to rewrite my blog software again (probably using Jekyll). My blog-yak-shaving process works like this: "Oh, here's an interesting idea, I should blog about it. But my blog software is kind of annoying, I should really rewrite it first. Maybe …

A library just showed up in debian ("python-levenshtein") to measure the Levenshtein Distance between two strings: the minimum number of edits (inserts, changes, deletes) necessary to turn one string into another.

I've been thinking about ways to implement efficiently-edited large mutable files for Tahoe, and it seems like a tool …

Wow, so long since I updated this. Each time I remember that I do have a technical blog, and think to add something to it, I am tempted to start by rewriting the whole blog system in some brand new way that will make it easier to post to (and …

I've been setting up a Trac instance for Buildbot, to make it easier for people other than me to publish advice and tips in a persistent and easily-searchable fashion, also to make the Buildbot web page a little bit less ugly. Trac is quite spiffy, and I've been looking over …

/usr/bin/watch is a little utility that will erase the screen, run a command, sleep for a few seconds, then repeat. You can use it to follow files in /proc without continually re-typing the command.

This program has been around since 1991. How is it that I've been unaware …

I ran some stats on my spambuckets tonight, comparing which of my email addreses get a lot of spam now versus 6 months ago, and noticed a few addresses that had stopped getting spam altogether. This gives me hope that by making my 10-year-old primary address less harvestable, the 500-plus …

I'm in the process of upgrading my systems to linux-2.6.14, and noticed a couple of neat patches that made it into the kernel this time around.

One is that FUSE (http://fuse.sourceforge.net) has finally gotten in. One thing I'd like to use this for is setting …

% whois lothar.com
...
domain:         LOTHAR.COM
person:         Brian Warner
nic-hdl:        BW116-GANDI
address:        The Castle Lothar
...
reg_created:    1995-07-29 00:00:00

Ten years ago today, I registered my little personal domain, with a woman at best.com named Pandora, who was nicely amused by the "company name". In the intervening time …

The last few weeks have been mostly filled with hacking hacking. I'm neck-deep in the implementation phase of a big new set of features, and it's taking forever. But I think I'm finally past the hardest part, the design issues that remain to be solved are at last medium-sized ones …

I started in on Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain last night, got about halfway through before I finally succumbed to sleep. It's a good read: finally he gets to have at least a few chapters that don't involve pervasing nanotechnology or uploaded personality constructs or galaxy-spanning machine intelligences.

I was thrown …

Man, what a great week. I spent a couple of days working with Donovan at his office on a couple of issues: making py.test capable of running Twisted test cases, improving LivePage event notification, and setting up a BuildBot for their in-house test suite.

Thursday night was the BayPIGgies …

I've been trying to decide whether to publish an SPF record for lothar.com or not. The last few days have seen an absolute deluge of spam from some german bastards, much of which is being forged in my name. The only real solution is, of course, to sign everything …

I was talking with Pavel (aka PenguinOfDoom, on #twisted) last week about iButtons, and mentioned the JavaButton I picked up years ago that I haven't really managed to do anything with yet. That prompted me to poke around the web site (was dalsemi.com, since bought by http://www.maxim-ic …

My friend Drew just sent this one along:

http://bitworking.org/news/Sparklines_in_data_URIs_in_Python

I'm pondering things I might do with this. I've been using Data: URIs for one of my projects, they're pretty handy and both Firefox and Safari are more than happy to take ridiculously large ones (50k or …

I just spent several hours getting a reasonable python environment working under Windows, something I had hoped to never have a need for. The Buildbot is having some.. disagreements.. with Windows, and it became clear that being able to reproduce the problem locally was the only sane way to fix …

I'm pushing to get a new BuildBot release out on monday, so the last few days have been a flurry of commits (and the weekend will probably be the same). I was very pleased to hear that the Boost crew have implemented a Buildbot to run their (very large) regression …